In a typical computing environment, a user has an input device such as a keyboard, a mouse, a joystick or the like, which may be connected to the computing environment by a cable, wire, wireless connection or the like. If control of a computing environment were to be shifted from a connected controller to gesture or pose based control, the system will need effective techniques to be able to determine what poses or gestures a person is making. Interpreting gestures or poses in a tracking and processing system without knowing the pose of a user's body may cause the system to misinterpret commands, or to miss them all together.
Further, a user of a tracking and processing system may stand at one of various different possible angles with respect to a capture device, and the user's gesture may appear differently to the capture device depending upon the particular angle of the user with respect to the capture device. For example, if the capture device is unaware that the user is not directly facing the capture device, then the user extending his arm directly forward could possibly be misinterpreted by the capture device as the user extending his arm partially to the left or the right. Thus, the system may not work properly without body pose estimation. Further, if the estimation technique used is not fine-grained enough, smaller gestures such as finger movements may not be detected.